The Institutionally Media continues to have to report successes in Battle for Iraq
The number of attacks during the four weeks encompassing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was far lower this year than during the same period last year, despite recent threats by insurgents to inflict heavy casualties, according to U.S. officials and independent statistics.
...overall violence for the period was down 40% compared with the 2006 Ramadan, and U.S. military deaths fell by half, to 49, according to the U.S. military and icasualties.org, which tracks casualties in Iraq. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior said violence in September, which included two weeks of Ramadan, was at the lowest monthly level of the year.
This year's Ramadan may have been the least deadly for U.S. troops in Iraq, according to icasualties.org, which lists 98 troop deaths during Ramadan last year, 93 the year before, 104 in 2004, and 88 in 2003.
Civilian deaths amounted to one-fifth of the level in September 2006, according to icasualties.org, although the group said such figures tend to be unreliable.
The Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent coalition that includes Al Qaeda in Iraq, issued a statement in mid-September saying it would launch a Ramadan offensive through Oct. 22.
But reinforcing the notion that when it comes to Iraq, there is never a Silver Lining, this reduction in violence is proving to be a hardship for some. No, what follows is not a story recounting the effect on the anti-democratic Islamists, but rather the grave-diggers
At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn't good.
A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.
Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq.
"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead,” said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. “People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more.”
Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it’s 4,000 or less, he said.
Malik said that the daily tide of cars bearing coffins has been a barometer of Iraq’s violence for years. The number of burials rose and fell several times during Saddam Hussein’s persecution of Shiites, and it soared again during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Then in the 1990s, the daily average fell to 150 or less, Malik said. With the current war, the burials again reached 300 daily.
In the early days of the war, some bodies brought for burial had been victims of Saddam, found by their families in unmarked mass graves. Later, there were surges; September 2005 marked a high point after a stampede during a Shiite Muslim festival killed hundreds on a Baghdad bridge. More than 1,300 were buried in a single day, Malik said.
Well, as far as barometers go, I gravediggers are a pretty good reflection of what's going on in Iraq.
